Sweden Cooperation

Artic huskies, near Kiruna, Sweden.

Sweden is a country with a population below 10 million, smaller than that of some major cities. By GDP it is not in the top twenty largest economies, and only six countries spend a higher proportion of national income on social security. So how can a country that is so demographically small, and state dominant, be ranked as one of the world’s most innovative countries? Sweden has produced more billion-dollar tech companies—Spotify being the most notable—per capita than anywhere in the world bar Silicon Valley. There is clearly something distinctly innovative in Swedish waters, but what?

Sweden does not fit the traditional vision of innovation, the lone founder or business taking on and changing the world—that is the hyper-capitalist, American ideal of winner takes all, the individual business triumphing over the system. In Sweden, the exact opposite is true. Its innovation economy is based on a deeply rooted culture—one that stretches from the primary school classroom to the corporate boardroom—of consensus and cooperation.

Swedish innovation rests on a cooperation between industry, state, and academia, defined as the Triple Helix model by social scientists Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff in the early 1990s. In many countries, industry complains that it can’t access the talent to meet its needs, and that commercializing academic research is troublesome. In Sweden, where there is a strong stress on vocational education, companies spend more time working with schools and young people, and universities such as Linköping and Blekinge have made knowledge transfer a core part of their purpose, so the same skills gaps do not arise. The national innovation culture rests on the effective cooperation of the different institutions required to make it happen. Companies need universities, which provide them with talent and ideas that can be commercialized. Universities need support from government, government relies on the taxes generated by industry, and must also work with it to devise an appropriate regulatory environment. The better the overlapping cooperation among all three parties, the more effective, forward-thinking, and innovative an ecosystem can become.

The same spirit of cooperation informs everything from how schools are run to the way companies are managed. In a Swedish classroom the approach is much less didactic than a traditional curriculum-based model found elsewhere. Instead, pupils are taught based on their interests, and teachers have the flexibility to adapt to the needs of a particular class. The focus is on feeding children’s curiosity, helped by the fact that there is no formal learning until the age of six, uniforms do not exist, and much more time is spent outside. The education system is also set up to encourage independence, with most children traveling to school on their own by the age of eight. What is taught from a young age carries on throughout life, and Swedes are always respectful of your time and theirs. When we hosted a party and invited people for 7 p.m., the doorbell rang at 6:59, and eight people were already waiting outside.

In business, the Swedish management ethos is similarly cooperative and based on flexibility rather than hierarchy. Decisions get made not by a boss who tells the team what to do, but through a collaborative process: a series of meetings that only produces a decision once all aspects have been considered and everyone has had the chance to have their say. To some this might seem inefficient, but it means that once something has been decided, it tends to stick. This democratic ethos has helped Swedish entrepreneurs become trailblazers of the internet era, from Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström, who explained the team-first approach to me when I interviewed him in the company’s early days, to Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who has led the creation of Europe’s most successful internet start-up.

Cooperation is the root of effective teamwork—the value that shows us how to listen to each other, support one another’s needs, and work more effectively as a group than we ever can alone. It is cooperation that creates stronger, happier, and healthier institutions, from school to the workplace. And as Sweden shows, it encourages innovation and provides the catalyst for outsize commercial success. As polarized political systems around the world are finding, without cooperation everything can grind to a halt and acrimony rules. Sweden points to a better, more mutual way forward.